kernel-ark/arch/x86
Dmitry Torokhov 453dc65931 VMware Balloon driver
This is a standalone version of VMware Balloon driver.  Ballooning is a
technique that allows hypervisor dynamically limit the amount of memory
available to the guest (with guest cooperation).  In the overcommit
scenario, when hypervisor set detects that it needs to shuffle some
memory, it instructs the driver to allocate certain number of pages, and
the underlying memory gets returned to the hypervisor.  Later hypervisor
may return memory to the guest by reattaching memory to the pageframes and
instructing the driver to "deflate" balloon.

We are submitting a standalone driver because KVM maintainer (Avi Kivity)
expressed opinion (rightly) that our transport does not fit well into
virtqueue paradigm and thus it does not make much sense to integrate with
virtio.

There were also some concerns whether current ballooning technique is the
right thing.  If there appears a better framework to achieve this we are
prepared to evaluate and switch to using it, but in the meantime we'd like
to get this driver upstream.

We want to get the driver accepted in distributions so that users do not
have to deal with an out-of-tree module and many distributions have
"upstream first" requirement.

The driver has been shipping for a number of years and users running on
VMware platform will have it installed as part of VMware Tools even if it
will not come from a distribution, thus there should not be additional
risk in pulling the driver into mainline.  The driver will only activate
if host is VMware so everyone else should not be affected at all.

Signed-off-by: Dmitry Torokhov <dtor@vmware.com>
Cc: Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>
Cc: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@goop.org>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2010-04-24 11:31:26 -07:00
..
boot Merge branch 'x86-setup-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/linux-2.6-tip 2010-02-28 10:43:53 -08:00
configs
crypto include cleanup: Update gfp.h and slab.h includes to prepare for breaking implicit slab.h inclusion from percpu.h 2010-03-30 22:02:32 +09:00
ia32 x86: correctly wire up the newuname system call 2010-04-20 09:17:21 -07:00
include/asm Merge branch 'x86-fixes-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/linux-2.6-tip 2010-04-15 12:20:56 -07:00
kernel VMware Balloon driver 2010-04-24 11:31:26 -07:00
kvm KVM: x86: Fix TSS size check for 16-bit tasks 2010-04-21 13:51:42 +03:00
lguest lguest: stop using KVM hypercall mechanism 2010-04-14 21:43:56 +09:30
lib Merge branch 'x86-rwsem-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/linux-2.6-tip 2010-02-28 10:41:35 -08:00
math-emu
mm Merge branch 'master' into export-slabh 2010-04-05 11:37:28 +09:00
oprofile perf, x86: rename macro in ARCH_PERFMON_EVENTSEL_ENABLE 2010-03-01 14:21:23 +01:00
pci include cleanup: Update gfp.h and slab.h includes to prepare for breaking implicit slab.h inclusion from percpu.h 2010-03-30 22:02:32 +09:00
power Merge branch 'x86-fixes-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/x86/linux-2.6-tip 2010-04-07 11:02:23 -07:00
tools x86: Remove trailing spaces in messages 2010-02-07 17:47:51 +01:00
vdso include cleanup: Update gfp.h and slab.h includes to prepare for breaking implicit slab.h inclusion from percpu.h 2010-03-30 22:02:32 +09:00
video
xen include cleanup: Update gfp.h and slab.h includes to prepare for breaking implicit slab.h inclusion from percpu.h 2010-03-30 22:02:32 +09:00
Kbuild
Kconfig x86: Increase CONFIG_NODES_SHIFT max to 10 2010-04-02 19:09:31 +02:00
Kconfig.cpu Merge branch 'x86-rwsem-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/linux-2.6-tip 2010-02-28 10:41:35 -08:00
Kconfig.debug Merge branch 'perf-fixes-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/linux-2.6-tip 2009-12-11 20:47:30 -08:00
Makefile x86-64: Allow fbdev primary video code 2010-02-16 21:22:26 -08:00
Makefile_32.cpu